Monthly Archives: July 2009

Hiring the right Interim Manager can relieve employee stress, avert workplace conflict and assist in managing change. It provides smooth guidance through a transitional phase by specialist experts in the field, carefully selected for compatibility with your corporate environment.

Hiring the wrong one can have the opposite effect, provoking conflict and stress at all levels. But the arrival of any Interim Manager is liable to cause stress in the early stages.

Not long ago, I ran some courses for a big Dubai swimming-pool contractor, whose CEO had died suddenly, and I got to know the Interim Manager, Zayed, fairly well. When he heard I was a stress consultant, he joked that he might be in the market before long. I asked him what the problem was, and he said there were three.

First, he was the only person around the office who had never known the director, and this inhibited day-to-day dialogue.

Second, they could remember two disastrous cases of Interim Management. One time, the agency had clearly sent along the first one out of the box, without proper screening or selection, and he turned out to know nothing about the swimming-pool market.

The second time was even worse, more like the ‘last one out of the box’ – a problem-personality who had been impossible to place elsewhere.

Finally, the Interim Manager is always going to meet resistance from individuals who feel threatened or merely envious. One embittered junior executive kept trying to find out Zayde’s salary, which was quite high, but which he did not have to reveal. Unfortunately this executive was also one of those classified as ‘dead wood’, which he would soon have to recommend for redundancy.

So there will always be some stress attaching to Interim Management. The advice can only be – find a reputable agent, and brief them sensitively about the aims and objectives of your employment agenda. And see how interim management can indeed relieve stress instead of causing it.

Have you heard of a bad case of interim management, causing stress in the team ?

Tell us what happened – or just what you think and feel about common workplace situations like this.

In our readers-comments box. Now.

How to support a team in shock – with ‘Crucial Dialogue at Critical Moments!’ – just one of Keynote Presenter, Carole Spiers’ presentations that have decisively changed attitudes and mindsets!

Is Absence Management a function that you can outsource? Or is it too personal, as an emotive area of workplace conflict and stress reduction?

This issue was put to the test when a previous client and friend of mine, Aisha, was appointed HR Director of one of UAE’s biggest vending-machine operators. It was a huge impersonal group, which had been suffering a steep rise in absence – too much to be coincidence, clearly a case of bad attendance spreading from one employee to the next. And the stress effects on management were impossible to ignore.

Arriving in her new job, she found that the team were largely untrained in Absence Management, and they did not know where to start in solving their escalating problem. She felt that the right solution was to retain someone of my background. But the trouble was, the company had a firm policy against outsourcing.

With difficulty, she managed to procure a budget for us to come in and train the HR staff (though not the line managers, unfortunately), and we had to be in and out in six weeks. This meant organising a ‘lightning’ version of our usual training programme, and I was worried that it might not be enough. But we made a good job of the first session, explaining the importance of the mission, and that small, young team quickly understood their own importance.

Soon they were listening attentively and responding well, and I could feel that we were getting through to them.

After a short interval, the newly-trained team was able to conduct its own Absence Management agenda, so avoiding the one big drawback to outsourcing – that it would set up an atmosphere of mistrust, with all employees being treated as malingerers until proved otherwise. And before long, the company did thankfully manage to reverse its disastrous absence record.

Have you heard of Absence Management being successfully outsourced?

Tell us what happened – or just what you think and feel about common workplace situations like this. In our readers-comments box. Now!

A classic combination of managing stress and managing change occurred when I had to cope with the redundancies at a manufacturer of big-name cameras that were still using film.

In particular, I was having to counsel a longstanding employee, Nida, who worked at a service-centre for these cameras, where her best friend Aliyah had just been made redundant. Both were having trouble coping with stress.

Aliyah had moved on to work for an obscure charity, and claimed that she was finding new fulfilment, though she did not look healthy or well-adjusted. Nida was worried about her, and it made her feel painfully guilty for still being in her own well-paid job. To complicate matters further, there was actually a possible basis for genuine guilt.

For it was Nida who had proposed a recent re-organisation of the department, which had given her a slight edge of seniority, so that if one of them had to go, it would more likely be Aliyah.

At our first counselling session, this guilt-led stress was affecting Nida so badly that she was almost wanting to quit and join Aliyah in her charity work. This was the surest sign that she had got things out of proportion. I told her to appeal to Aliyah for a sincere answer over whether she blamed her for the outcome.

At the second session, she was able to tell me that Aliyah’s answer was no, she understood that it was simply a declining market. So one big obstacle was lifted out of our way. From there, it was easier for me to demonstrate that nearly all survivor-guilt is imaginary, and so achieve a big step forward in stress reduction.

Have you heard … ?

… of someone suffering from survivor guilt that you feel to be unjustified?

Tell us what happened – or just what you think and feel about common workplace situations like this – In our readers-comments box. Now.

Build a believable vision of a corporate future – with ‘Change is your Opportunity for Growth’ – just one of Keynote Presenter, Carole Spiers’ presentations that have decisively changed attitudes and mindsets!

In tough times, you sometimes detect one particular word, repeated like an alarm-signal that reveals stress-symptoms requiring attention. The word I always hear in times like these, is ‘indispensable’. The feeling of indispensability has, in fact, quite a lot to do with the psychological need-to-be-needed, that is to say insecurity, and this tends to show up more in those of only average talent.

As a motivational speaker, I was once giving a series of lectures on organisational change at a small private airfield in the North of England, which was being upgraded into a local passenger terminal. For the catering department, this meant expanding from sixty covers up to nearly two hundred – in fact, crossing a line where a restaurant manager would need to employ a deputy and an assistant.

But this manager, not remarkable either for talent or dynamism, wouldn’t accept anyone new on his territory – a bad team-building error. As demand accelerated, he found himself working in a robotic manner, incapable of taking a ten-minute break because the feeling of indispensability was so strong. As an experienced stress consultant, I could see that he wasn’t coping with stress, and persuaded him to go for a medical check-up, which confirmed that he was heading for a bad breakdown.

He took two months out, and finally agreed to come back as deputy manager – a happier and more balanced individual, who found time to play golf a couple of afternoons a week. He found he wasn’t so indispensable after all!

Wise managers have always declared that everyone, without exception, is dispensable.

Build a believable vision of a corporate future – with ‘Change is your Opportunity for Growth’ – just one of Keynote Presenter, Carole Spiers’ presentations that have decisively changed attitudes and mindsets.